Life in Trump Nation

Taking time off from this blog, which has petered out slowly over the course of this over-blogged election season, to try a new blog about reactions to and results of the election itself. Visit it here: http://lifeintrumpnation.blogspot.com/

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Addressing the Extremes

Yesterday, from two politically astute pals, I received separate messages that, taken together, represent the extremes of my left-leaning friends. One, who manned the barricades in Paris in '68 and lost his job in publishing when he tried to unionize workers, wrote that he was very much enjoying canvassing in PA every weekend and was surprised and impressed by the organized passion of the 20-somethings leading the way. The other, who has maintained a daily FB post on presidential politics that has been intelligent, educational, and increasingly bleak, announced that he's leaving the Democratic Party and becoming a Green.

I have written amazingly little about the 2016 election, mostly because what the hell is there to say that isn't being said and spread, People's Mic-fashion, at lightning speed across the planet? I have been unsurprised at the fact that *gasp* there is racism in the world and that *gasp* Donald Trump is a con man. Even the appalling coverage by the media hasn't shocked me, because I've read On Bended Knee and Manufacturing Consent and haven't had much hope that things would get better with the addition of social media.

What's really astonished me has been the tendency of some on the left to spout Breitbartisms (and worse) unironically and to collude in the logical fallacy that equalizes evil on both sides. Some of the dumbass stuff I've read this week (friends of friends, and not people I know, thank God) includes that Trump and Clinton are longtime friends who conspired to have Trump win so that Clinton could easily take the presidency and that Bernie was bought out by friends of the Clintons.

Is Clinton the "establishment" candidate? Well, they both are, to be honest. I'm "establishment," too, despite having solar panels on my roof and working out of my home for 30 years. I know that for sure, because I know that if anything goes wrong with me, I can pick up the phone and call a doctor, a lawyer, my town supervisor, a manager at NYSEG, my assemblyperson, and so on up the line. I may not be in a position of power, but I am connected to and comfortable with those who are. And you know what? Based on your upbringing, schooling, and life choices, so are most of you. That's privilege.

I cannot tolerate people who are apologists for Trump rally racists, who lib-splain away those people's homophobic rants by suggesting that trade agreements broke them. No, they are racist homophobes. Yes, corporate America sold them down the river, their unions cravenly abandoned them, and people have lied to them for 30 years that their jobs are returning and not being handed over to robots. But they are still dangerously uninformed racist assholes. Sexist, too, whatever their gender.

Hillary Clinton wasn't my first choice; I voted for Bernie in the primary, as I always vote my heart in a primary. I don't like her foreign policy, and I don't like her stance on fracking. I don't like her careful parsing or her penchant for secrecy; the only concern at all that I have about her server is that it represents an end-run around FOIA. Bill Clinton was about my eighth choice in 1992. That's the way it goes. None of us loves incremental change, but with the exception of important Court cases, historically in the U.S., big changes have come about through power grabs by the executive, and I'm not sure that's something to be admired.

Our local Democratic Party signed up nearly 5,000 new voters this year; I know, because I had the letters to new voters printed up. Around half of those (I assume, based on their timing) were Blanks and Greens and Working Families voters signing up to vote for Bernie in the Democratic primary, but half happened post-primary. Without talking to each of them, I don't know why they made their choices—but it's interesting.

I am a woman of Jewish heritage who is raising a woman of Jewish heritage. In our family, meaning those who might join us for a holiday meal or funeral, we have Asian immigrants, Latinos, and African-Americans. Catholics, too. I have no problem with people's leaving the Democratic Party, which like all organizations of a certain size and age, is rusty, unwieldy, and as hard to turn as the Titanic. But in this year of Trump, I would posit that voting for a third-party candidate is the epitome of white [male] privilege.

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Anti-PC and What It Hath Wrought

Everyone has a point at which political correctness crosses the line and becomes more irritating than enlightened. For Bill Maher, it was Halloween costumes. For me, it's being expected to know which pronoun to use when discussing someone who has not made public the pronoun it/they prefer. For Donald Trump, it's everything.

"PC" is a term usually used disparagingly or ironically, but it refers to something real: an attempt to avoid hurting others. It emerged most likely from the Maoist concept of "firm and correct political orientation" and was adopted by the New Left, sometimes ironically, sometimes seriously—Toni Cade Bambara wrote in 1970 that "a man cannot be politically correct and a chauvinist too," calling out leftist men for their treading a party line that kept women trailing behind.

Political correctness led to multiculturalism. In my world, the world of children's textbooks, we found ourselves replacing Dick and Jane and Sally with Miguel and Shonda and Lian. Dad was no longer the only one who went to work, and Mom wasn't the only one who cooked. But guess what? Those edits reflected changes in the world; they did not create the changes.

The backlash, when it came, was furious. Allan Bloom started it with The Closing of the American Mind, which could have been a little-read grumpy philosophical tome but instead hit a nerve and became, as Camille Paglia later said, "the first shot in the culture wars." The 1990s were filled with anti-PC backlash, as exemplified by this article from the Times and the conference it describes.

"It's a manifestation of what some are calling liberal fascism," said Roger Kimball, the author of "Tenured Radicals," a critique of what he calls the politicization of the humanities. "Under the name of pluralism and freedom of speech, it is an attempt to enforce a narrow and ideologically motivated view of both the curriculum and what it means to be an educated person, a responsible citizen."

Rapidly the Right (Bloom, Kimball, D'Souza, Paglia, and others) redefined political correctness; and any positive implications PC might have had regarding inclusion, diversity, feminism, critical analysis, and tolerance were buried under the labels of dogmatism, favoritism (as in affirmative action policies), and, yes, a new intolerance. For a through-the-rabbit-hole view of this thought in action, see Chapter 4: "Freire and Political Correctness" in Peter Roberts's book on Paulo Freire.

Fast forward 20-plus years, and you have the GOP presidential candidate saying, "I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct. I've been challenged by so many people, and I don't frankly have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn't have time either." And when you interview his followers and ask them what they like about him, 9 out of 10 mention that he says what's on his mind and isn't PC. By which they mean that he doesn't care if his words hurt others, if he's sexist or racist, or if he appears to be ignorant about the world. They like that about him because it's how they want to be. And they somehow believe that by pushing back on political correctness, they can correct the movement of the country toward a diversity they would rather ignore.

I recently called out a woman I know on FB who said of Hillary Clinton, "When it comes to schmoozing for campaign money, she ought to have a mattress strapped to her back with the meter running." I accused her of self-hating anti-feminism and said that I was a Bernie supporter, but people like her made me question my sanity. Whereupon she replied that she, too, was a feminist, but "To go easy on Hillary because of her gender would be sexist." And that is what anti-PC hath wrought: The inability to see how certain language applied to one gender/race/ethnicity/sexual orientation can be hurtful. Men would never be accused of "having a mattress strapped to their backs," not even in an anti-PC world. PC may be rigid and foolish and often hypocritical, but anti-PC returns us to the 1950s, a Stone Age world of Dick and Jane. That just isn't the world in which we live, no matter how much Trumpeters wish it were so.

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Media Noise

If this election season has taught me anything at all, it is that the 24-hour news cycle has changed the world, and not in a good way. The fact that Donald Trump can say anything at all and still gain votes, or this week that Hillary Clinton can make half a dozen major gaffes and actually improve her position, tells me that it no longer matters WHAT the media say about you. What matters is that they say it and repeat it often. If your name is mentioned 250 times a night, and your opponent tops out at 100, you win, even if you are being reviled. Nobody is actually listening anymore because there's just too much input, but the sounds of candidates' names are like dog whistles, imprinting meaninglessly but powerfully on voters' brains.

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State of Emergency

Baltimore was always one of those cities that people warned you about before you visited, in vague terms that masked the racism of the comments: You need to know where you're going, Don't wander far from the hotel, Stick close to the harbor, Don't stop on the way in. A lot has been said this week about the institutional segregation that encouraged African American residents to "respect... the sensibilities and prejudices of the white people" and led to two separate and unequal HUD programs in the city of Baltimore. One of the most interesting things I've read this week, which comes from the author of a book Simon recommends, is about the role of the Baltimore Sun in advancing and solidifying segregation and anti-Semitism in the city.

"Before I began working on the book, I had little idea of the extent of the white-supremacist record of the newspaper that employed me from 1969 until 2004. The record makes me utterly uneasy – and not only because of The Sun. My uneasiness stems from a realization that other newspaper companies in various parts of the country may share similar histories of segregation, except that those remain hidden because no one has probed them."

A month ago, the police commissioner was under fire for declaring that Baltimore had a race problem. And even though the reporters of this article were writing about a topic on which "leaders agree," they tempered their discussion with examples of the races getting along and the point that the commissioner came from a place that ranked even higher on the racism scale than Baltimore. Media coverage of Baltimore that focuses on the "mother-of-the-year" beating her rioting son seems to me no better than the Sun of 1910. By all means, let's blame Baltimore's problems on bad parenting.

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How Merger-Happy Publishing Harmed Education

How sad is it that one can be "the largest education company and largest book publisher in the world" and still not crack the Fortune 1000? Yes, the corporatization of education is a sorry-looking thing, and publishing of any kind is still a bad bet for your portfolio.

I worked in educational publishing in NYC at a time when you honestly needed a scorecard to keep track of who was buying whom. I got a job at Harper & Row Educational one day, moved to Harcourt Brace Jovanovich the next, and saw the ed division at Harper dissolve before Harper & Row itself was bought up by Murdoch, who later merged it with William Collins, another acquisition, and formed HarperCollins, now Harper. Then HBJ (formerly Harcourt Brace & World, before which it was Harcourt Brace & Company, once Harcourt Brace & Howe) left NYC for Orlando and San Diego, where it was purchased by General Cinema Corporation, which soon divested itself of anything having to do with cinema and started calling the publishing division Harcourt Brace & Company. It is now Harcourt, Inc. and is owned by Reed Elsevier, which sold the educational publishing group to Houghton Mifflin, forming Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

The story of the 1990s, by which time I had left NYC and moved upstate, was all about foreign companies (Murdoch's News Corp.; Reed Elsevier, which is British and Dutch) buying up American publishers. Bertelsmann (German) bought Doubleday, Bantam, and Random House. Maxwell (British) bought Macmillan. Viacom, which is American, and which does appear on the Fortune 1000 at rank 210, tried its hand at publishing but couldn't find the profit in it, so it sold many of its holdings to a British company called Pearson. That's how Pearson acquired Scribner, Simon & Schuster, and Prentice Hall. Along with Simon & Schuster, Pearson got several education-related subsidiaries, including Allyn & Bacon and Silver Burdett Ginn.

So over the course of a few decades, foreign companies gobbled up dozens of American publishers that dated back to the 1800s. (Macmillan was 1843, A&B 1868, Silver Burdett 1888. Prentice Hall and Simon & Schuster were relative newcomers at 1913 and 1924 respectively.) These companies simply were not profitable enough for American corporations to take a chance on them.

When fast food companies conglomerate, you run the risk of all the food tasting the same. When educational publishing companies conglomerate, you run a higher risk. When I started in ed publishing in 1980, there were twenty or so companies right in NYC who were trying to capture some part of that market, and other companies (Dick Jane and Sally's Scott Foresman, for example) were scattered across the U.S. That competition gave genuine choices to school districts who were looking for new textbooks or other educational materials. By the time I left in 1991, the market had already shrunk by more than half. And today we are stuck with a small handful of niche publishers and then gigantic megacorps (though not gigantic enough by Forbes's standards) like Pearson, the company everybody loves to hate. As a source of income, publishing just stinks, so, as the author of this Fortune article states, "Testing has helped Pearson reduce its dependence on old-fashioned publishing."

A lot had to go wrong to get us to this point: American publishers had to wear blinders and ignore the movement toward digital publishing; American corporations had to hold their noses when offered a chance at purchasing a publisher; successful European companies (Pearson does rank in the top 100 on the British Stock Exchange, which shows what a sad state British industry is in) had to see the possibilities in cornering the education market worldwide rather than sticking to their own tiny market shares; and everyone involved had to worship at the fire of the global free market. It's not at all clear to me where we go from here.

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Floridian Thoughtcrime

'You think, I daresay, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words—scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone... Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?'

No, that's not Florida Governor Scott telling his troops to ban the terms "climate change" and "global warming" in all government correspondence, although it could be. Nor is it the NYC Council arguing over the use of "bitch" and "ho." It's the venomously orthodox Syme talking to Winston in George Orwell's 1984.

Syme understands that if you curtail language properly, you limit the range of thought and eliminate the possibility of thoughtcrime. In Florida, admitting human's control over climate is thoughtcrime. In Oklahoma, suggesting that America is unexceptional is thoughtcrime. In South Carolina, putting together the words "evolution" and "fact" is thoughtcrime.

1984 was 31 years ago, but some states are just catching up.

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The Disinformation Era

I first saw one of these fake sites in 2012, and I wish I could find it again, because it was genius. For a long time, the very first site you came to when you Googled our local Democratic candidate for Congress was 100% fake. There are still a variety of fake sites bearing her name. And now her opponent has put one up himself—not really fake, I guess, because his name's right there at the bottom. It's "just a way of getting this information out there," as the RCCC likes to say.

It's pretty clearly covered by both the First Amendment and caveat emptor rules; if you don't read carefully, shame on you. Just because you thought you were giving $50 to the candidate, but you really donated to her opponent, well, I guess you're exactly the idiot that opponent was hoping to nab.

We Dems claim to be above all this, but maybe we're just sorry we didn't think of it first. After all, it's a really brilliant way to cover up the fact that you have no plan, a great way to spread hate speech without getting your hands dirty.

Our current Congressman doesn't believe in climate change and just voted to sue the President. Govtrack ranks him second most conservative in the NY delegation. He has staffers that make the governor's aides look ethical. My fingers are itching to run to Wix and set up his fake website, but honestly, it would be no more appalling and freakishly hilarious than his existing real one.

P.S.: If you are so down on liberal Ithaca, Tom, maybe you shouldn't advertise so much of it in your homepage video.

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Nimbleness and the News

At TST BOCES this year, we've talked a lot about the advantages of being a smaller, more localized organization than some other BOCES. It gives us the opportunity for a sort of agility that larger organizations just cannot have. If necessary, we should be able to turn on a dime to support new objectives or unexpected requests. We haven't entirely reached our goal of nimbleness, but we're getting there.

A few weeks ago, wearing my other hat as Director of Communications for the local Dems, I met with the editor of a new online newspaper, the Ithaca Voice. The paperless paper went live on June 15, and just five days later, this new medium was tested in the fire of a genuine disaster when a tractor-trailer laden with cars missed the turn at the bottom of State Street, avoided a group of construction workers, and barreled into Simeon's, killing one, injuring several, and nearly destroying a beautiful historic building at the entrance to the City.

What made the Voice's coverage stand out was its nimbleness. Other media tweeted from the site, but the Voice did so continuously and in depth. The Journal was limited by the fact that the accident happened on a Friday late afternoon, when much of the Saturday paper is already complete, and the paper does not publish on Sunday. The radio stations were hampered by lack of personnel and the fact that their local news coverage mostly happens in the morning. Other media arrived late to the scene, but the Voice had already been sending updates for hours on Facebook and Twitter, while putting together longer pieces on its website.

To its credit and reputation, the Voice clambered all over the story, interviewing key players, posting photos (but deciding not to post video of the incident itself), and generally comporting itself like a real, live, capable, scrupulous, nimble newsforce to be reckoned with.

UPDATE: And now the Voice reveals itself as a credible investigative tool as well, with an aspect of the story no one else has broken.

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40 Under 40

In which the mayor of Ithaca makes it onto a Washington Post list of politicians to watch. And he's a good mayor, too!

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Honey Maid

I don't usually share pages like this, but I really like this story. Scroll down to watch the original ad that caused all the flap, then click on the response up top. ♥warming.

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R.I.P.

This one really hurts. He was a flippin' genius.

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New Websites

I spent the last few days putting together a couple of new websites, one for me, and another for the Dryden Drama Boosters. Next up, the County Democrats. If only someone would pay me, this could be a new career.

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Required Reading

I wasn't always a fan, but I am now. Here's local Amy Dickinson interviewed on her marriage to Bruno Schickel. Really a lovely piece.

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Required Reading

A thoughtful article by our local fishing and hunting writer, proving that not all Second Amendment supporters are loons and that moderation is unfairly quashed outside of politics as well as inside.

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Required Reading

Slate on how we might report on the shutdown if it were happening elsewhere.

The current rebellion has been led by Sen. Ted Cruz, a young fundamentalist lawmaker from the restive Texas region, known in the past as a hotbed of separatist activity.

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"The Ithaca Journal Cuts Jobs"

It's hard to believe there were any left to cut. They asked for comment, so here's what I wrote to their "content" editor.

Ten years ago, everyone I knew subscribed to the Journal. Today, I am the only person I know who does. On my street, the red paper boxes have disappeared. You may think that this fall in subscriptions is the cause of your layoffs, but I believe that it is the effect. The IJ staff is spread so thin that this is no longer a local paper at all. Meanwhile, school districts and municipalities are gleeful because nobody is attending their meetings and reporting on their activities. The Fourth Estate is dead, long live corruption and mismanagement. I remain a subscriber out of loyalty and inertia, but it’s harder every year to justify the expense.

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What's Most Shocking...?

...To learn that our government is spying on us (really? did you skim the Patriot Act at all?), to discover that small-government proponents heartily approve, or to witness the media crawling all over this as though it's something unprecedented and new?

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Freedom of Speech, Public-School Style

Paul sent me this article from The Buffalo News, which caused me to spew water out my nose. Hamburg's former superintendent is Dryden's former superintendent, Mark Crawford, who once called me into executive session to spank me for talking about the district on this blog. Presumably he is not involved in the current lawsuit, but the Hamburg Educational Ethics blog does mention him by name, and not in a positive light.

Although Concerned Hamburger's style is not terribly subtle, he is certainly committed and passionate, especially about issues of open government and reporting of finances. I'll be watching this one with interest.

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Dryden in Mother Jones

A reporter from Mother Jones came to town to find out what all the fuss was about.

"It has got to be a morale boost to people who have been suffering the adverse affects of this industry," [Earthjustice attorney] Goldberg said, "to see people in a small town stand up to an incredibly powerful and wealthy industry and win."

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